Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (5 page)

Tam blushed, shrugged. “We were talking…” She gestured with both hands open towards Greg. “Come on, it’s Greg!”

Greg pushed his tablet in front of them. “I have my mom’s ship here. Estimating the return puts her in this region.” He pointed at the darker ellipse on the navigational map. “I added these other regions based on my estimates from Control’s navigation feeds.” He zoomed out, tapped on three other regions and began scrolling the display over. “Here’s our object. With your estimates, it’s heading on this trajectory.”

Emma squinted. “Those are outdated…”

“Ok, I’ll update them with your new data. But allowing for a bit of sludge, I can extrapolate that this thing is moving along this elliptical arc.” He extended the plot further and zoomed out again. “Right into these ships.”

The blobs were labeled Pandora, Calypso, Making Time, The Terror.

Calypso was Emma’s father’s ship.

Emma grabbed the tablet and started updating the plots based on her most recent data.

“What do we do?” Tamra looked back and forth at Emma and Greg. “There’s nothing to worry about, is there?”

Emma was still inputting values, comparing with her own plots from the Olympus data. “Space is pretty big, Tam. The chances of anything hitting anything else in open space is, well, astronomical.”

Greg grabbed her hands. “Did you talk to Powell already?”

“We just came from there.” Tam sniffed. Her hands were clammy. Greg looked at her with concern.

“We need to go back and tell him this. We have to get this up to Lighthouse.”

Emma gave his tablet back, the cone on the object was narrowed to a smaller band that neatly intersected the inbound trajectories of the ship. Mars visible at the bottom of the display. “What makes you think Control hasn’t plotted this already?”

Greg shut off the tablet and stowed it in his pack as he stood. “I don’t know. Maybe they have, but if not, they need to see it. Doc Powell should be able to get their attention.” He helped Tamra up, and headed to the door. “Let’s go!” Emma followed.
 

010

Lighthouse.

Commander David Mancuso struggled into his jacket. The uniform wasn’t fitting too well anymore. He’d leave the gloves and hat at least; it wasn’t a funeral.

People in the hall nodded and smiled as he walked past. A few said happy birthday or thanked him or just said hello. He was the highest ranking officer on the station and something of a celebrity.

He was one of the oldest people on Mars. Or in orbit. Today he was another year older.

And he was dying.

The Commander took a deep breath, ignoring the pain in his chest and entered the mezzanine.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY COMMANDER MANCUSO!!!”

Noise makers and applause filled the space. The huge, curved windows showed Mars reeling slowly past below, the dark stain of Sinai Planum rolling by, Olympus Mons a visible bump on the limn of the red planet in the distance coming towards them.

“Thank you, thank you everyone.” Mancuso grinned and nodded at them. And damned if he didn’t tear up. I knew this was coming and they’re still getting to me. Damnit. “Where can I get a drink?”

“Over here, sir!” Dan Wilkins yelled over from behind the bar. Mancuso passed through the room of faces, shaking hands, saying thank yous, getting claps on the shoulder. Mancuso noticed the balloons and streamers decorating the mezzanine.

Wilkins cleared his throat, and projected himself louder than it was strictly required for Mancuso to hear him. “Before we get into what you’ll be drinking, we have a small presentation for you.”

Sunil Pradeep, his comms officer winked at him and raised a half-full glass of something that looked like orange juice towards him. Mancuso nodded back and tried not to look too sour.

The room quieted down around him, heads turning to listen in. “For your many years of service… decades, really.” Wilkins was warming up and Mancuso felt a roast coming on. “We have uncovered a gift befitting a man of your considerable age.” Some whooping from the crowd. “It wasn’t easy. There aren’t many things around here that old that aren’t considered vital equipment, but we dug deep and came up with this!” A flourish produced a brightly-colored wrapped box.

“It was found in the belly of the old Exodus ship that brought our first colonists here. Somehow missed during the disassembly and hidden deep in the first Commander’s quarters on Mars. We believe he might have been sleeping with it, but we don’t think he’ll mind if we pass her on to you, sir.” Some polite laughter.

“From us to you, many thanks, and happy birthday!” Wilkins handed the box to Mancuso and shook his hand. Cheers. Applause. Calls to open it. Inevitably, calls for a speech.

Mancuso did his best to try to calm the people. “I still don’t have a drink.” Laughter. Wilkins poured him a healthy glass of vodka. “I really (really!) don’t know what to say.” He paused and looked around at the faces around him. Most of them half his age. Or younger. All smiling. “I guess I’d better open this.”

Commander Mancuso did his best to carefully untie the bow, unstuck the paper and unwrapped the package. An ornate, brown and gold decorated box with antique gilt lettering proclaimed Single Malt, Glenmorangie 21. No one living now had ever tasted scotch before.

Wilkins enthused, almost reverently, “It’s the last bottle of scotch in the universe, sir. Open sometime, preferably with a friend.” He raised his own glass. “Cheers, sir. Happy birthday. And many more.”

Mancuso, visibly touched, took the bottle out of the box and marveled at the brown liquor before raising it so people around him could see. He clinked his vodka glass with everyone around him. “Thank you so much, everyone. Wilkins, stop staring at my scotch.” And then he drained the vodka eliciting more cheers and laughter.

The crew, families and officers started to break up into groups. Somewhere, some music started playing and the lights dimmed fractionally. The Commander asked Wilkins to stow his present and got another drink to prepare for some mingling.

Captain Zhang was talking to one of his crew mates and a few other people. He smiled and welcomed him over. “I was just telling my crewmate here that it was always good knowing you were watching over us while we’re out there. Thanks for running the Lighthouse, Commander.”

“You do all the dangerous work, Captain. It’s an honor to serve.”

Mancuso continued exchanging pleasantries with the captain when a purposeful Bryce Nolan strode through the crowd towards him. He politely deflected offers of food and drink, patted one of the pilots on his shoulder.

“Good to see you here, though I think you’re supposed to be on watch.”

Nolan leaned in and whispered, “Commander, you need to come to the deck. We’ve lost telemetry on one of our ships.”

Mancuso felt the air drain out of the room.
 

011

Making Time.

Jerem was on watch in the cockpit, his father getting some rest in his bunk when he saw the flash. A light fluttered into existence, bright at first then slowly fading out. He checked the logs and pulled up a recording of the event.

“Dad, you awake?” He clicked off his intercom and checked the boards. They had lost telemetry from Mars Control for nearly 2 minutes, the signal was reacquiring.

“Dad, you should get up here.” He just hollered down this time, not bothering with the intercom.

Jerem checked the data plots from his instruments alongside the video of the event. Big, full-spectrum spike. All the way to gamma ray. A big wall of noise on the graph.

Hal pulled himself into the cockpit, looking every bit the grizzled space captain, bearded, hair askew, eyes still rimmed with sleep but alert. He’d been sleeping in his flight suit.

“Looks like an explosion, bearing… 292. Full spectrum. We lost telemetry for about two minutes…” Jerem trailed off.

“Lemme take a look,” Hal exchanged places with his son, Jerem walking him through the displays.

“Event started here.” Pointing at the screen. “20:16:23, lasted for two seconds, still trailing off. Emissions were big. Right on the mark for…”

Hal looked at the readouts. They were both thinking the same thing but didn’t want to say it out loud yet.

“Pandora.” Mike Bruno’s ship. Crew of three. They haven’t come back on the board. The curved line Pandora left on the nav screen came to a dot, then stopped.

“What do we do?” Jerem took his seat in the co-pilot’s station giving up the captain’s chair for his father. The Pandora was a week ahead of them. It would take them off-course if they investigated, but they could make up the time. They had enough fuel.

“Let’s get some more data from Control. Shut down main engines and bring up the link.” Hal started making some notes on the navigation console.

“Aye, sir. Is the ship secure?” Jerem switched into protocol mode. He was still a first mate in training on this vessel and would be graded on his performance. He thought about the stuff he had scattered about his bunk and winced.

Hal checked a few displays. “Ship is secure.”

“Shutting down main engine in 3… 2…” A loud clunk rolled through the ship. “Main engine shutdown.”

The shift to weightlessness was abrupt. The noise on board suddenly shifted from a dull rumble to a long, low whine as the engines and fuel systems wound down. Jerem drifted out of his seat fractionally before belting in. A water bottle floated up in front of him.

Jerem tapped a few commands into his console. “Network should be coming back up.”

“Alright. In the meantime, let’s put our good eye on this thing. Is the Pup ready to go?”

Jerem checked the status of the unmanned sensor and reconnaissance probe, saw green. “Yessir.”

“Get him out there.”

Jerem pulled out his visor from the bag beside his seat and put it on. He slid the controls for the remote out from the console in front of him and powered up the drone mounted on the back of the ship. The image in his goggles replaced his view of the cockpit with the black sky of space, the Sun shining off their port bow, the antenna array on the front of the ship glinting in the sunlight. A bump from inside the cabin as the Pup was released and guided up above the ship.

The carrier light lit up on the pilot’s console indicating a solid connection from Mars. Hal got on the radio, opened a channel. “This is MSS27 Making Time to Mars Control. We’ve detected a possible explosion near the likely position of MSS13 Pandora. Data attached. We are powered down and awaiting further instruction. Our flight plan is changing. Please advise. Will repeat in five minutes. Over.” Hal switched off the comms channel and turned around to Jerem.

“Do you have anything, yet?”

Jerem zoomed in with his helmet display and worked the controls in front of him on his console. “Not really. Just a faint glow ahead of us. Hard to see with the Sun in our face.” He swept the drone left and took in a quick view of Mars, itself a tiny black dot with a thin crescent of brownish red floating ahead of them.

“Take a full-spectrum scan and bring the pup back in.”

“Roger.” Jerem worked the controls.

Hal checked the clock, another couple minutes until his next broadcast. It would be nearly twenty minutes before he could expect a reply from Control. While they were adrift, Mars continued to speed along on its orbit. Since they’d stayed until the latest possible around Kleopatra, they had a limited amount of drift time built into their schedule. For every minute they stayed at rest, they would have to make up for it in acceleration. The longer they waited, the trickier and more violent the transit to stay on track to reach Mars.

He flipped the transmitter on, flagged his message for all ships. “All vessels. This is MSS27 Making Time. This is a system-wide broadcast. All ships. Possible incident involving Pandora. Please exercise caution. Coordinates attached. MSS27 out.” He repeated the message in text only. The other ships in the system should receive it over their telemetry links at least and hopefully take heed.

Five minutes were up. “Mars Control this is MSS27 Making Time…” He ran the message again.

A distant thump. “Pup’s aboard, sir.” Jerem reported.

Hal nodded, “Thanks. Send out your data to Control, please.” He scrubbed through the recording on his console, but there wasn’t much to see. Just space. The high resolution optics on board the Pup couldn’t resolve something that small, that distant. He could see the bright point of the Calypso burning ahead of them on the video. They were returning three days earlier than they were.

The Calypso was four days behind Pandora.

“Jer, I want to do a diagnostic on that fuel line while we’re here. Go check it out.”

Jerem stowed his remote goggles back in their bag. “Aye-aye, cap’n.” He unbuckled his harness and floated out and down the hatch to the lockers.
 

012

Lighthouse.

Bryce Nolan had briefed Mancuso on the way back to the deck about a text transmission from Calypso. They’d seen a light and were asking if it was Pandora. For some reason Watchtower hadn’t alerted them first. Mancuso wondered if one of its systems was on the fritz and he hadn’t gotten an incident report about it. Or worse, what if he’d just missed it?